Dharmakīrti

The life of Dharmakīrti, a profound and rigorous philosopher of
Indian Buddhism, is a subject of hagiography with little solid data
upon which we can confidently
rely.[1]
If we go by Tibetan sources, he seems to have been born in South
India and then to have moved to the great monastic university of
Nālandā (in present day Bihar state) where he was supposedly
in contact with other Buddhist luminaries, such as Dharmapāla
(530–561 C.E.). Tibetan sources describe his life in very
colorful terms. Indeed some make him out as initially a
Mīmāṃsaka who then broke with that non-Buddhist
school; others depict him as extraordinarily skilled in debate and
hint at a difficult and arrogant personality. Judging by the opening
verses in his most famous (and by far his longest) work, the
Pramāṇavārttika (Commentary on
Epistemology), Dharmakīrti himself thought that his
philosophy would not be understood by his contemporaries because of
their small-minded vanity. At the end of the
Pramāṇavārttika, he went further and
prophesied that his work of unrivalled depth would never receive its
proper recognition, but would age in obscurity locked away in
itself.[2]

He was wrong about that, fortunately for us. His philosophy certainly
did find recognition, at least it did in many parts of Asia. He, and
his predecessor Dignāga (c. 480–c. 540 C.E.), were
responsible for a school of Buddhist thought that actually had no name
in Sanskrit, although in Tibetan it was known as “those who
follow reasoning” (rigs pa rjes su ‘brang ba); in
modern literature it is sometimes known by the convenient Sanskrit
misnomer pramāṇavāda, or more simply,
“the Epistemological School.” In any case, it is the
Buddhist school that provoked the most sophisticated and most
important philosophical debates with non-Buddhist rivals. It
represented Buddhism in the pan-Indian debates on problems of
universals, philosophies of logic and language, and issues of
justification, and had an enormous influence on Mahāyāna
Buddhism in Central Asia, especially in Tibet. Finally, although its
influence was relatively limited in medieval China (only a few of the
works of Dignāga were translated into Chinese, none of the works
of Dharmakīrti were translated), it has nonetheless become
increasingly important in modern Japan in supplying the epistemology
for Buddhist thought.

It is still debated in the modern community of researchers on
Dharmakīrti whether one should place this philosopher in the
seventh century C.E. or in the sixth. Part of the reason for this
indecision is that a significant time seems to have elapsed before
Dharmakīrti achieved notoriety in India, although it is unclear
how much. Erich Frauwallner came out strongly for 600–660 C.E.
as Dharmakīrti's dates, using an argumentum ex silentio
that is short of conclusive—hardly more than one piece in the
puzzle.[3]
One problem is that there may indeed be some counterevidence that
would place Dharmakīrti a half-century earlier, inter
alia his possible connections with Dharmapāla, a
sixth-century idealist philosopher who, according to Tibetan
historians, was the monk that ordained Dharmakīrti. Some have
thought that there is even a reference to Dharmakīrti in
Dharmapāla's commentary to Dignāga's
Ālambanaparīkṣā (“Analysis of the
object [of perception]”). However, because this commentary is
only available to us at this time in Chinese in an unreliable
translation by Yijing, it is not clear that the passage in question
does in fact refer to Dharmakīrti. Caution or even agnosticism on
the matter of Dharmakīrti's dates still seems to be warranted,
although the scales seem to be tipping towards an earlier date.
Krasser (2012) relies heavily on connections between Dharmakīrti,
Bhāviveka and Kumārila to push the dates of
Dharmakīrti's activity back to the mid sixth century C.E.
[4]

Leaving aside the question of dates, Frauwallner (1954) did most
likely pin down the order in which Dharmakīrti composed five of
his seven works, namely, and in this order, the
Pramāṇavārttika,
Pramāṇaviniścaya (“Ascertainment of
Epistemology”), Nyāyabindu (“Drop of
Reasoning”), Hetubindu (“Drop of Logical
Reasons”), and Vādanyāya (“Logic of
Argumentation”). The two minor works, the
Sambandhaparīkṣā (“Analysis of
Relations”) and Saṃtānāntarasiddhi
(“Proof of Other Minds”), are more difficult to place in
the sequence. There is also an autocommentary to the
Pramāṇavārttika, the
Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti. However, the
hypothesis of Frauwallner that there was a proto-text that later
became the Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti is
still speculative.

In what follows, most of our discussion will center around the
Pramāṇavārttika, as it is by far the largest
and most important of Dharmakīrti's works. It is an unfinished,
highly philosophical, commentary on the
Pramāṇasamuccaya (“Compendium of
Epistemology”) of Dignāga. At various key places in the
text we see that Dharmakīrti seems to have formulated some basic
ideas as a reaction to now lost commentaries by Dignāga's
students, the most important being the commentary on the
Pramāṇasamuccaya by Īśvarasena. A
notable reaction to Īśvarasena is Dharmakīrti's
emphasis on certainty (niścaya) (see sections
1.4
and
3.1).
There are also innovations that, as far as we know, were not provoked
by earlier commentators. Whether in metaphysics, epistemology or
philosophy of language, causal theories carry considerable
philosophical weight. These theories are probably to quite a degree
original, not found in Dignāga's own writings. In what follows,
we will examine what we consider to be the most salient features of
Dharmakīrti's philosophy, bringing out inter alia the
importance of this causal stance. It is however impossible to discuss
all the major themes that were traditionally commented upon by
Buddhist scholastic writers on Dharmakīrti. Choices and
exclusions had to be made. For readers who seek a comprehensive
treatment of the historical development of Dharmakīrti's
positions in his seven works, the best reference to date is
Eltschinger (2010).

The Dignāga-Dharmakīrti school—contrary to certain
globally anti-realist Buddhist schools like the
Madhyamaka—recognizes that there are, indeed must be, some
entities that are fully real. It is, however, a school that is
thoroughly nominalist. What is real for them is only the
particular (svalakṣaṇa). By contrast, anything
that is a universal (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) is
unreal; at most it is a customarily recognized fiction needed for
thought and language. What demarcates the real from the fictional is
that the former has causal powers and exists in a purely punctual way,
a new entity each moment. Both Dignāga and Dharmakīrti were,
in their final positions, followers of the Yogācāra
idealism, although they clearly went to great effort to make their
positions largely acceptable to proponents of external objects and to
idealists alike. Indeed in Dharmakīrti's case, most of his
philosophy is presented from a point of view in which external objects
(bāhyārtha) are (provisionally at least) accepted
as real. Idealism only enters the picture after verse 194 of the third
chapter of Pramāṇavārttika. He certainly does
have sophisticated arguments to prove idealism, that is, the view for
him that there are no external objects, that “everything
cognizable is internal” (antarjñeyavāda),
“only mere data” (vijñaptimātra),
[5]
and that subject (grāhaka) and object
(grāhya) are not two distinct entities. Nonetheless, it
is striking that the main thrust of Dharmakīrti's
metaphysics—his nominalism, his proofs of impermanence and his
causal theories of properties—is largely unaffected by the
choice of external realism or idealism. Similarly for his
epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, with a few adjustments
here and there. Even on matters of solipsism and other minds, the
choice of idealism makes little difference for Dharmakīrti. In
the Saṃtānāntarasiddhi, for example, he goes
to great length to show that the Yogācāra idealist can use
the same arguments for other minds–i.e., the argument from
analogy—as the Sautrāntika realist, and just as the realist
can avoid solipsism so the idealist supposedly can
too.[6]
For our purposes, essentially for simplicity and conciseness, we
shall treat of Dharmakīrti's philosophy as accepting external
objects, with the proviso that most of the same ideas can be
reinterpreted to conform to idealism. Another way to put it is that
we'll read the Pramāṇavārttika along the
broad lines of what Tibetan siddhānta (grub
mtha') literature terms the “position common to
Sautrāntika [external realism] and Cittamātra
[idealism]” (mdo sde pa dang sems tsam pa thun mong ba'i
lugs).

It [i.e., the universal] does not come there [from somewhere else], it
was not there already, nor is it produced subsequently, nor does it
have any parts. [And even when in other places] it does not leave the
previous locus. Oh my! It's just one disaster after another.
(Pramāṇavārttika
I.152)[7]

No doubt the fundamental intuition in Buddhist nominalism, just as in
other nominalisms, is that universals are occult pseudo-entities that
should not be taken seriously by a responsible thinker concerned with
ontology. As the above quotation from
Pramāṇavārttika shows, Dharmakīrti lists
a series of anomalies: they don't come from anywhere, they are
partless, aren't produced, are in several places at one time, aren't
seen, wouldn't seem to have any discernible function, and so and so
on. Such bogusness of pseudo-entities becomes a recurrent theme in
Buddhist Epistemology. A later Indian Buddhist writer,
Paṇḍit Aśoka, inspired by Dharmakīrti and
Dignāga, ridiculed real universals as follows in his
Sāmānyadūṣaṇa (“Refutation
of Universals”):

One can clearly see five fingers in one's own hand. One who commits
himself to a sixth general entity fingerhood, side by side with the
five fingers, might as well postulate horns on top of his
head.[8]

The collection of intuitive anomalies and appeal to seriousness may
very well be the most powerful strategies nominalists East and West
have, even though their realist adversaries will predictably maintain
that they are untouched because universals are not the kind of things
that need to be in one place at one time, etc. However, there are
other considerations for Dharmakīrti besides the intuitive ones.
There are metaphysical arguments and even an underlying political
stance behind his nominalism (see
section 4).
The recurring Buddhist metaphysical argument against the reality of
universals is that they would be subject to an intractable
“one-many” problem: the universal, which would be one
thing, would have to be somehow present in and share the nature of
several different particulars. The problem for Dharmakīrti would
then be that because the universal would share the multiple natures of
the various particulars, it too would itself have to be many different
things.[9]
The alternative whereby the universal would be a radically separate
entity (arthāntara) from the particulars and remain
unitary in nature is dismissed as irreconcilable with the obvious fact
that we say that several things possess the same property. Buddhists,
not surprisingly, have to consecrate considerable attention to the
Nyāya idea that universals are indeed such radically
separate entities, but linked to particulars via an inherence
(samāvāya) relation. The counter-arguments in
Pramāṇavārttika and
Sambandhaparīkṣā become technical, turning in
part on the unreality of relations, but again the intuitive Buddhist
stance is clearly that inherence, like universals, is an occult
entity, posited ad hoc and without any discernible effects in the
world.

What figures again and again in Dharmakīrti's philosophical
arguments against universals and other pseudo-entities—and is a
major innovation upon Dignāga—is the principle that what is
real must actually affect things and bring about a change. More
exactly, the criterion for something being real is that it must have
“causal powers” (arthakriyāsamartha) and
“perform causal roles”
(arthakriyākāritva).[10]
And crucially, particulars have such powers and perform such roles
while universals and other pseudo-entities do not.
Pramāṇavārttika III.3 (with Manorathanandin's
additions in brackets) summarizes his idea:

Whatever has causal powers (arthakriyāsamartha), that
really exists (paramārthasat) in this context [i.e.,
when we examine reality]. Anything else is declared to be [just]
customarily existent (saṃvṛtisat) [because it is
practically accepted through mere conceptual fictions]. These two
[i.e., the real and the customary] are [respectively] particulars and
universals.[11]

Things, properties, powers, whatever they may be, if real and causally
efficient, must occupy just one location in time (kāla)
and space (deśa) and have only a singular nature
(svabhāva), by which Dharmakīrti means that nothing
real can span, or be present in, several distinct objects over
different times and places, and possess the many natures of the
various
particulars.[12]
This not only rules out “horizontal universals”
(tiryaglakṣaṇa), like blueness, which would have
to be present in several blue particulars at one time, but it also
rules out “vertical universals”
(ūrdhvatālakṣaṇa), or substances
persisting throughout time, the numerically identical individual that
would be present in each time-slice of a
thing.[13]
It is only series of qualitatively similar moments that constitute
what we customarily take to be enduring objects, but there is actually
nothing that remains numerically the same for more than one
instant.

Dharmakīrti has two arguments for the momentariness
(kṣaṇikatva) of all that exists, one quite
obscure and unconvincing, which he inherited from previous writers
like Vasubandhu (5 century C.E.), and the other more
promising.[14]
The first argument, which nowadays is commonly known as the
vināśitvānumāna, or “the inference
of things perishing [spontaneously],” turns on the long-attested
Buddhist idea that perishing must be of the intrinsic nature of any
object. Perishing due to its intrinsic nature, something will always
perish as soon it
exists.[15]
The point is that such moment by moment destruction is spontaneous
(ākasmika) and is the uncaused real nature of things,
because it cannot be an effect of any cause. The effect of such a
cause, i.e., the absence of the entity, would have to be a type of
non-being (abhāva), and non-being is unreal.

A key underlying principle of the
vināśitvānumāna is that negative facts,
such as absences, are not part of the ultimate furniture of the world,
but are just fictional conceptual constructions, as they are devoid of
causal powers. Equally, a fiction lacking causal powers is not the
effect of something else. While it is obviously impossible to deny
that hammers smash pots, the absence (abhāva) of the
pot, i.e., the non-existent pot, is not an effect, just as other
non-existent things (abhāva), like horns of rabbits, are
not effects of anything either. Hammers and the like are thus not
actually causes of the pot's absence but of it turning into potsherds.
That idea is perhaps defensible, in that arguably the mere absence of
something—a purely negative fact—might be less real and
less efficacious than the presence of other
things.[16]
Nonetheless, the rest of the argument looks to consist in a number of
non-sequiturs going from that difference in efficacy and
reality between absences and presences to the idea that perishing is
somehow the real nature of things, that it must be intrinsic to them,
and that therefore things must perish spontaneously moment after
moment. Let's grant the Buddhist view that the perishing of x
is the real property of changing into a new thing, and not just
x becoming absent. If it is accepted that hammer blows
do change pots into potsherds, then why couldn't someone
skeptical about the Buddhist's arguments just take that as
the model of how things perish when they do? It does not follow from
that model of perishing that a pot could not endure for quite a
while.

There is, fortunately, a much better argument for intrinsic
momentariness than the problematic
vināśitvānumāna. This argument is known
as “the inference [of things' momentariness] from the [mere]
fact of [them] existing” (sattvānumāna), and
seems to be largely Dharmakīrti's own invention, first developed
in the second chapter of his
Pramāṇaviniścaya. If anything exists and is a
specific thing rather than another, it is because of its causal
efficacy (arthakriyā), or powers to produce such and
such effects. Thus, the sattvānumāna reasoning,
concisely formulated, is that things are impermanent, i.e., are new
things moment after moment, because they are always causally efficient
in some way. (Although not stated, it seems to be presupposed that
real things are every moment causing some or another
different effect. The differences between effects would be subtle ones
that often escape our perception.) The key step in the argument is
that nothing causes new effects while itself remaining the same.
Dharmakīrti, in the opening passages of the
Vādanyāya, argues that if something were permanent
(nitya), it would be causally inert as it would neither
produce its effects all at once (yaugapadyena) nor serially
(kramena). Of course, it is the second hypothesis that is the
most attractive possibility for an espouser of permanently enduring
things: he would hold that a permanent unchanging cause would produce
a series of different effects, not because the cause changes in any
way, but simply because of the presence of new and different
surrounding circumstances.

Suppose it said that a permanent thing has successive concomitant
circumstances in dependence upon which it brings about a collection of
effects
serially.[17]

To this objection, Dharmakīrti, and especially the later
commentators like Śāntarakṣita and
Kamalaśīla, reply that if a would-be cause remained
unchanged over time and if it was only the concomitant circumstances
that changed, then it would have to be the new circumstances that were
the actual cause of the new effects. After all, the permanent thing
would be present unchanged both when the new effects are present and
when they are absent. This failure of the co-presence and co-absence
(anvayavyatireka) conditions for determining cause and effect
would show, for Dharmakīrti, that the ever-present thing is not
the actual cause of the new developments, but that something else is.
This is not unreasonable. If an epidemiologist, for example, found
that certain factors had been constant for quite some time before the
outbreak of an infectious disease and remained unchanged at the time
of the outbreak, he would tend to discount them as being responsible
for the epidemic. And if he found that some new powerful factors
immediately preceded the outbreak, he most likely would pin the
causality on them rather than on what had remained constant all along.
The logic in these arguments against permanence can be generalized to
various would-be entities, including notably the non-Buddhist idea of
the permanent creator God (īśvara) who remains the
same throughout time while producing a series of effects.

We seem to have in Dharmakīrti what would nowadays be termed a
type of “causal theory of
properties.”[18]
Particulars have causal properties, that is, powers
(śakti) or “fitness” (yogyatā)
to produce such and such results, in that they will produce those
results when the right “complete collections”
(sāmagrī) of circumstances and other properties are
united. And what makes any property what it is consists in the
contribution it makes to the potential causal behaviour of what has
it.

The question then arises in what way particulars have properties or
powers. It is important to emphasize that for Dharmakīrti and
many other Buddhists particulars are not separate entities that
own or have separately existing properties/powers.
Much of the argument here in Buddhist Epistemology (and in other
schools of Buddhism) is essentially an appeal to perceptual evidence
and common sense: particulars are real and must be objects of
perception; nobody perceives a particular without its properties, and
indeed nobody can see a difference between the bearer of the
properties and the properties themselves; hence any such distinction
is unreal. These reasons are also fleshed out into a fundamental
position, initially strongly advocated by Dignāga, that
subject-predicate differences in language do not mirror a
corresponding difference between substances and properties in reality
(see
section 2.2).
Bare particulars that somehow have properties, or in which properties
are instantiated, would thus be ruled
out.[19]

Are the powers themselves particulars or universals? It can be argued
that Dharmakīrti and his fellow Buddhists are best understood as
trope theorists: the powers/properties that make up
particulars are themselves particular entities, differing according to
each location in space and time (see
section 2.2.2).
Charles Goodman and others have made a persuasive case that
properties (dharma) for Ābhidhārmika Buddhists are
indeed tropes, i.e., properties that are particular—a blueness,
a heat, or a hardness specific to one place-time and not common to
several. The Epistemologists' version of dharmas would be no
exception in that respect of being particulars rather than
universals.[20]
The causal theory, however, does make for significant differences
from Ābhidhārmikas. Many important Ābhidhārmikas,
i.e., those of the Sarvāstivāda school, regarded
dharmas from a complex double perspective: a) their intrinsic
natures (svabhāva), i.e., what they
are, and b) their present causal activity
(kāritra) along with their capabilities
(sāmarthya) to lead to effects when the appropriate
circumstances obtain. The intrinsic natures of dharmas are
given in terms of categorical properties—being blue, being
square, being hard, etc—and are treated like quiddities, what
dharmas simply are in themselves. The activities and
capabilities, on the other hand, are presented in causal terms, e.g.,
giving rise to perceptions of blue and square, producing subsequent
similar things, etc. Not surprisingly, there are involved Abhidharma
debates on the relationship between the intrinsic natures and causal
activities/capabilities, a rather typically evasive
Sarvāstivādin response (i.e., that of Saṅghabhadra)
being that they are neither the same nor
different.[21]
The most radical way out of this problem of the relationship between
the intrinsic and the causal is to say, as do Nāgārjuna and
his Mādhyamika followers, that there cannot really be any
intrinsic natures at all: if anything had a quiddity intrinsically, as
Ābhidhārmikas and others hold, it would absurdly need to
have it completely acausally—nothing could ever cause a thing to
be what it is intrinsically. A less radical strategy is a causal
theory that makes no separation at all between what something
is and what it does. That is the strategy that Dharmakīrti ably
pursued.[22]

Let us grant that for Dharmakīrti particulars are somehow
identified with appropriate causal powers. Is it then an essential or
an accidental feature of a thing x that it will produce
y under the appropriate conditions, and is it essential or
accidental to y that it is caused by x? In a causal
theory of properties these features are generally taken to be
essential. To what degree does Dharmakīrti subscribe to that? The
point needs analysis. On the one hand, Dharmakīrti does very
strongly advocate a type of connection that seems to be more than an
accidental feature of things. This is the so-called “connection
by essential natures” (svabhāva­pratibandha)
[23]
between cause and effect, and this connection will guarantee that
there is a “nexus where [the effect] will not be without [the
cause]” (avinābhāvaniyama). Arguments
invoking this nexus can, for example, be seen in the
Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti's discussion of
I.34–47. He begins by introducing verse 34 as follows:

Well, if observation and non-observation are no basis for knowing the
co-presence and co-absence [of smoke and fire], how then does one know
that smoke does not deviate (na vyabhicarati) from
fire?[24]

Dharmakīrti then argues that whatever is smoke must have
originated from fire in order for it to be smoke—otherwise it's
just a smoke-like thing, a pseudo-smoke. And he also says that if
something like a “termite tower”
(śakramūrdhan) does actually have the causal
properties of fire—i.e., the fitness (yogyatā) to
produce real smoke—then it indeed must be on fire (see Dunne
2004, 335–338).

That said, on the other hand, there certainly is no development of a
modal logic of necessity and possibility and talk of possible worlds
in Dharmakīrti, nor in Indian philosophy generally for that
matter.[25]
Although Buddhist Epistemologists do often talk of non-existent
things, like rabbit's horns
(śaśaviṣāṇa), it is far from clear
that they would predicate positive properties (say, sharpness) of them
in such and such possible situations or “worlds.” What
then is the force of the “must” in the smoke-fire cases,
and more generally when terms have a “nexus” so that one
will not be without the other? Words that are typically used in these
kind of Dharmakīrtian discussions are niścaya
(certainty) and avyabhicāra (not-deviating). Many modern
interpreters have used the term “necessity” in
interpreting these and related terms (See e.g., Dunne 2004, ch. 3;
Iwata 2004); this might lead one to think that when F and
G have a nexus, it is a necessary truth (i.e., true in all
possible worlds) that for all x, if x is F
then x is G. A more likely interpretation, however,
is that Dharmakīrti is dealing with the actual world and that
these key terms are to be interpreted epistemically in terms of
justification: given such and such natural connections between
F and G, we can be sure that for all
x, if x is F then x is G.
Taking niścaya in this way, his point would not be about
metaphysical necessity throughout worlds but more about justified very
strong confidence that a universally quantified material implication
holds without exception in the actual world because of natures in this
world.[26]

A comparison with Hume may bring the tensions in Dharmakīrti's
position into better focus. Hume had famously said in Section 7 of his
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “We may define
a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the
objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the
second.” Causal connections are said to consist in
contingent regularities established by observation. What the
above-cited passage from the
Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti suggests,
however, is that for Dharmakīrti such mere regularities are
somehow not enough and that something stronger is at stake: there are
features “in” the causal relata themselves. Indeed his
causal theory of properties allows him to assert that fire, being what
it is, must cause smoke under the right conditions and smoke, being
smoke, must be caused by fire. That said, there are also very
important passages in Dharmakīrti's works where he does speak of
establishing causality because one observes an effect when there is a
particular cause and does not observe it when that cause is absent. As
in the case of Hume, this too is an observation of regularities and
would seem to be fallible, subject to exceptions. It is the Indian
method of observing successive co-presence (anvaya) and
co-absence (vyatireka) and is a type of induction used
throughout Indian philosophy to establish connections between two
types of things. Dharmakīrti relies on a multi-step procedure
that is sometimes explained in terms of a threefold combination of
observations (upalabdhi) and non-observations
(anupalabdhi) and sometimes in terms of five. Thus we have
the so-called “triple” or “fivefold
examination” (trikapañcakacintā) of
causality that is developed by later Buddhist writers, such as
Dharmottara, Jñānaśrīmitra and
Mokṣākaragupta.[27]
Other provisos are also added in an attempt to rule out certain bogus
circumstances that would vitiate the procedure (see e.g., Lasic 1999).
The details and problems cannot be taken up here. This method of
anvaya and vyatireka has been profitably compared
with J.S. Mill's “Method of Agreement and Difference” to
establish causation (see Matilal 1998,17; cf. Tillemans 2004,
265–269).

So how are these passages in Dharmakīrti and the commentarial
literature to be taken? How do his two positions hang together? One
interpretation might be to say that Dharmakīrti, somewhat
naïvely, thought he could arrive at a thoroughly
infallible inductive procedure by ever more adroit qualifications of
the observations and non-observations. Gillon (1991) is an attempt to
show that Dharmakīrti's philosophy, in attempting to come up with
such a watertight procedure, ran up against a problem of induction
that wouldn't go away. A more charitable exegesis is to say that his
philosophy recognizes that the way we find out through a
posteriori methods whether or not x and y are
causally related is a quite different matter from what causality
is—the latter, as we had remarked, involves causal
properties of things that make them what they are. Thus we might have
to discover empirically that fire will burn fuel under such and such
conditions, but nonetheless that property is not one that it could do
without and still be fire. The more sophisticated interpretation of
Dharmakīrti would then be that causality between things is a
more-than-contingent connection due to the constitutive properties of
things in this world, but nonetheless one that is established a
posteriori. To take a modern analogy in a Kripkean vein, while
water must be H2O and whales must be mammals, we discover those facts,
which in some sense could not be otherwise, fallibly through empirical
methods.

Here is the basic epistemological stance that Dharmakīrti
inherited from Dignāga's Pramāṇasamuccaya.
Just as there are only two kinds of objects of knowledge, real
particulars and fictional universals, there are only two types of
knowledge, or more exactly “sources of knowledge”
(pramāṇa), viz., “perception”
(pratyakṣa) and “inference”
(anumāṇa). Perception is always purely
non-conceptual and non-linguistic whereas inference is conceptual,
linguistic
thinking[28]
that proceeds on the basis of good reasons. Particulars are the
objects of perception and universals are the objects of
inference—one sees specific shapes, colors, but when one thinks
“red is a color” the subject and predicate terms range
over several things. Perception has the special status of giving
direct access to the real, whereas conceptual thought is, in an
important way, distorted (bhrānta) because it
“superimposes” universals that aren't actually there in
the particulars themselves.

For Dignāga (and his successors) this split between perception
and conceptual thought was part and parcel of a type of
foundationalism. Perception is directly causally bound to particulars
and “fixed” (niyata) by them: its internal
representation (ākāra) of the object is causally
determined by, and corresponds to, the particular itself. It is for
that reason that perception is the fundamental “contact”
with the world upon which the superstructure of conceptual cognition
rests; conceptual cognition, on the other hand, is not fixed in this
way by particulars and can to a large degree think what it will about
whatever it chooses. The separation between perception and conceptual
thinking in Pramāṇasamuccaya is thus radical
indeed and yields what seems to be a counterintuitive consequence. For
Dignāga it would seem that one and the same object could never be
both perceived and thought about. Non-Buddhist thinkers, such as
Naiyāyikas and Mīmāṃsakas, did not have this
problem. They could cheerfully allow that when one person sees a vase
and another thinks about it, the type of understanding may be
different but the object is the same in that the conceptual thought
grasps a real universal vaseness that inheres in the same particular
vase that is perceived. But Dignāga could not go that route as a
nominalist. For him if the object of thought is vaseness, that object
is unreal and thus quite different from the real particular vases that
one sees.

Two problems loom large in Dignāga's account: (1) What are the
necessary and sufficient conditions of a source of knowledge
(pramāṇa) and when are we justified in thinking
that these conditions are met? (2) Given that only perception has
direct access to the real and is causally bound to it, how is it that
conceptual thought could ever be about real particulars at
all and be considered a genuine source of knowledge? We'll take up the
questions one by one.

Dignāga had left the problem of the nature of
pramāṇas largely open, as he did with the issue of
justification. These matters were left to Dharmakīrti, who
defines a “source of knowledge” in
Pramāṇavārttika II.1 as a “reliable
(avisaṃvādin) cognition
(jñāna)”, by which he means that the
cognition is right and reliable as a basis for
action.[29]
Some commentators, such as Dharmottara, have unpacked
“reliability” as meaning that the cognition leads to one
obtaining (prāpaka) the object one desires, a position
which along with passages concerning arthakriyā, might
seem to reinforce the view of some modern scholars that
Dharmakīrti was a pragmatist (see e.g., Powers 1994; Cabezon
2000; Katsura 1984).
[30]
Tillemans (1999, 6–12) examines this would-be pragmatism,
seeing the theory of truth in Dharmakīrti as a weak form of
correspondence. The pragmatism is better taken as a pragmatic theory
of justification rather than truth. We can justifiably affirm that a
cognition is correct if we can “confirm causal efficacy”
(arthakriyāsthiti), by which it is meant that we come to
understand that the object does in fact have the causal powers we
expected. We can justifiably conclude, for example, that we saw a vase
and not some vase-like illusion because after the initial perception
we then confirmed that what we saw does really hold water, as we
expected and wished (iṣṭa). Note that while most
sense perceptions are to be confirmed by subsequent perceptions or
inferences, there is no infinite regress here: some
perceptions—e.g., those of very familiar objects or of the
capacity of such objects to produce effects—need no subsequent
confirmation. Logical inference too needs no ulterior confirmation.
These are said to be “intrinsically sources of knowledge”
(svataḥ prāmāṇya) and are prima
facie reliable in that they will be trusted as knowledge unless
it is shown that some cause of error is
present.[31]

It is important to emphasize, against a simplistic pragmatic
interpretation of Dharmakīrti's position, that a reliable
cognition is not one that just happens to be right and works
to enable one to obtain what one seeks. It must also be a cognition
that came about via a reliable route, i.e., an appropriate causal
pathway or a set of good reasons. Tibetan scholars will emphasize that
to conceptually know P the knower must herself ascertain
P (Tib. nges pa = Skt. niścaya,
niścita) with a pramāṇa, and that this
ascertainment must itself involve antecedent reliable cognitions
(i.e., perceptual or conceptual pramāṇas) in order
to be genuine. Thus, for example, one ascertains P
on the basis of good reasons Q, R, etc., whose
characteristics one has ascertained earlier. If, however, one rightly
thinks P is the case, but did “not [first] ascertain
with a pramāṇa” (tshad mas ma nges
pa) the characteristics of Q, R, this is deemed
to be, in Geluk (dge lugs) texts, a “true presumption
where the [character of the] reason was not determined” (Tib.
rgyu mtshan gtan la ma phab pa'i yid dpyod), or following the
Sakya (sa skya) thinkers, a mere “doubt that is in
accord with the real” (Tib. the tshom don mthun). For
both these Tibetan schools, such an understanding of P is not
itself a pramāṇa. This is a credible account of
what Dharmakīrti held. In short, pramāṇas do
work out as we wish, but only because they are cognitions that have
followed the requisite reliable route.

But does this talk of ascertainment then mean that the Buddhist
Epistemologist adopts an internalist account of epistemic
justification? Is the Buddhist saying that when you genuinely know
something, you need to know that you know it, i.e., be able to
establish to yourself and others that you have the requisite
justification?
[32]
It is not at all clear that Dharmakīrti or his Tibetan
interpreters were internalists about epistemic justification. Nothing
in his own talk of “ascertainment” clinches an internalist
interpretation that the person who infers must also himself access the
reason and ascertain with a pramāṇa that it does
justify the inference. When the debater ascertains the characteristics
of the reason, all this may mean is that a person making an inference
must only in fact have followed a number of reliable
procedures to initially determine the characteristics of the reason.
It need not mean that when one knows something inferentially one must
also be aware of the justification basis, i.e., the reason, and know
that it does indeed justify the inference.

It might be retorted that Dharmakīrti's idea of all awareness
being “reflexive awareness” (svasaṃvedana)
shows his internalism. But “reflexive
awareness”—often termed “self-awareness” (even
though for Buddhists it is emphatically not an awareness of a
self and its states)—will not get us all the way to internalism
about justification either. Following Williams (1998), Kellner (2010)
and Arnold (2010), there seem to be to be two basic themes in the
positions from Dignāga and Dharmakīrti to
Śāntarakṣita that all consciousness is
non-conceptually reflexive: (1) that the mind perceives, with a
second-order perception, that such and such data is being presented to
it; it is thus non-conceptually aware of all its own states; (2) that
reflexive awareness is a condition of sentience: an experience is not
just a material process (like, say, digestion), but can lead to
subsequent memory and conceptualization because it is non-conceptually
“auto-illuminated.”[33]
On both versions, however, while someone could be aware that she is
now inferring P in reliance upon a reason Q, it is
hard to see that her simple second-order awareness of processes
“going on in her head” would also mean that she herself
would know that or why the inference was justified. Reflexive
awareness is aware of whatever conscious processes are occurring, be
they delusions or reliable. So, while a person would be aware of the
brute fact that thoughts were occurring, their credentials are another
matter.

At the heart of Dignāga's and Dharmakīrti's philosophies is
the principle that particulars, i.e., what is real, are only properly
grasped by perception; the way they are in themselves is thus said to
be “ineffable” (avyapadeśya; Tib. bstan
bya min), “not an object of words”
(śabdasyāviṣaya).[34]
Now, obviously, we do in some way manage to talk about
particulars—otherwise language would be useless in daily life.
But why then say that language and thought somehow fail to capture
them? The answer is twofold. First of all, grammatical elements, like
subject and predicate, qualifier and qualificand, agent and action,
etc., have no corresponding ontological features, as particulars are
unities admitting no distinctions between possessors of properties
(dharmin) and properties (dharma). Dharmakīrti
puts the point as follows in Pramāṇavārttika
I.61:

In all cases words expressing substances and their properties just
make this [conceptual] distinction. Thus there is no difference
whatsoever in the [object] to which they
refer.[35]

Secondly, and perhaps more decisively, the kinds or universals that we
think and talk about are not features of the particulars themselves
but are merely fictions. Of course, the fact that we do use terms like
“cow” non-arbitrarily may easily lead us to think that the
term must have corresponding real “grounds for its
application” (pravṛttinimitta),
and that cow particulars themselves are grouped in a natural
kind due to their common essential properties. But the
clear upshot of the Buddhist's nominalist position about universals is
that there are no such natural kinds, and that the usage of terms is
not explicable by matching up terms with them.

Ineffability thus unpacks as a thorough mismatch between
representations due to thought and language on the one hand and what
there is on the other. For Buddhist Epistemologists this mismatch
means that they cannot adopt unnuanced the predominant Brahmanical
approach of vyākaraṇa, a grammatically oriented
metaphysics in which genuine ontological features would be revealed by
the features of Sanskrit grammar (such as case and gender accord
between adjectives and nouns, connections between substantives via the
genitive case, etc. Much of Dignāga's philosophy of language is
indeed an attempt to account for such Sanskrit grammatical phenomena,
but without the realist baggage.) However, it also leads to a larger
matter. The problem is that if the real world is composed only of
particulars that are ineffable, it becomes difficult to see how
language could nonetheless somehow refer to real things or ever be
about entities in the world. The Buddhist Epistemologists
are, in effect, to borrow an idea of Donald Davidson (1984),
subscribers to a rigid separation between a conceptual scheme
and a perceptual content free from the scheme's additions and
distortions, and their problem then becomes how to bridge that very
scheme-content gap so that thought and language are still somehow
about reality. To solve this problem of “aboutness”
Dignāga had devised the theory of concepts, i.e., apoha
(“exclusions”). Dharmakīrti reinterpreted this
theory, once again, in terms of causal relations. Here are the broad
outlines.[36]

2.2.1 Dignāga's apoha

Let us speak about two Buddhist approaches to bridge the
scheme-content gap, “top-down”, or descriptive, approaches
and “bottom-up”, or causal, approaches. By
“top-down” we shall mean an account which maintains that
it is because of some specific (and perhaps ingenious) features of the
fictional proxy, or concept, that it pertains to particular things.
Even though it does not have the ontological baggage of a real
universal, the fictional proxy determines the reference of the words
because the descriptive content it provides does in some way have its
counterpart in the objects. Thus on a top-down approach, the fictional
stand-in for a universal like “blueness” would behave like
a property, a sense or a meaning, that belongs to the conceptual
scheme but would nonetheless qualify and serve to pick out the real
blue particulars in the world. This can be accomplished, according to
Buddhist Epistemologists, because the fictional proxies are, or can be
analyzed to be, “exclusions of what is other”
(anyāpoha), a type of double negation which applies to
particular patches of blue in the sense that each such patch is
non-non-blue.[37]
As Dignāga had put it in his
Sāmānyaparīkṣā (“Analysis of
Universals”):

A word talks about entities only as they are qualified by the negation
of other
things.[38]

In fact, Dignāga applied his analysis both to things and to the
words that express them: non-non-blue is the universal-qua-object
(arthasāmānya) signified by the term
“blue”, and non-non-“blue” is the
universal-qua-word (śabdasāmānya) that applies
to particular articulations of the word “blue”. For
Dignāga, the signified-signifier (vācyavācaka)
relation holds between these two
quasi-universals.[39]

Why are they “quasi” and not full-fledged universals? The
reasoning is not explicit in Dignāga. However, it can be
plausibly reconstructed. Buddhist Epistemologists generally subscribed
to the principle that mere absences of properties are of a lesser
ontological status than positive things. They would stress that
negative facts, like x not being blue, heavy, etc., are
constituted by our mere interests (i.e., we seek a blue thing at such
and such a location and come away empty-handed), and are less real
than the fact that x causes perceptions of blue, a fact which
is what it is objectively and independently of interests. It seems
that it is this general Buddhist intuition of the unreality of
absences upon which Dignāga relied. As the “exclusion of
what is other” is itself only a negative property/absence of
something rather than a presence, we are spared commitment to there
being real universals in addition to real particulars.

Dignāga's approach in the fifth chapter of
Pramāṇasamuccaya is indeed top-down in that he
relies upon the descriptive content of the apoha to pick out
the appropriate particulars. And top-down is also how the
“exclusion theory” (apohavāda) is presented
in the works of non-Buddhist opponents of Dignāga, as well as in
modern works treating of the subject. Bimal K. Matilal interpreted the
theory in this fashion (see Matilal 1971, 41), as did Hans Herzberger.
Herzberger (1975), developed an ingenious logical strategy, using some
possibilities offered by Emil Post's theory of twofold propositions,
to come up with what he termed a “resourceful nominalism,”
one that would explain how predicates applied non-arbitrarily to
individual things, that would account for our naïve semantic
intuitions, and nonetheless avoid ontological commitment to
universals. Every proposition would be analyzable as an ordered pair
of content and commitment—“apohist double negation”
would affirm content but deny ontological commitment. In what seems to
be at least partially a top-down approach, Mark Siderits has taken the
relevant double negation as involving two different types of negation,
choice and exclusion, so that it is the combination of the two that
picks out a class of individuals, all the while staying
nominalistically unengaged to universals (Siderits 1995; 2005).
Finally, perhaps the most striking modern use of double negation as a
way of specifying word-types and types of phonemes is to be found in
the Cours de linguistique générale of Ferdinand
de Saussure, although this 19th–20th
century Swiss structuralist was obviously unaware of 6th
century parallels in Indian philosophy and was not motivated primarily
by nominalist ontological worries.

It remains far from clear, however, how genuine nominalist mileage is
to be gained on a top-down approach, ingenious as it may be. The usual
charge against it by non-Buddhist critics, like Kumārila and
Uddyotakara, is circularity: if an understanding of blue is to be
analyzed as an understanding of non-non-blue and any negation
presupposes understanding the negandum, then understanding what
non-non-blue is would depend on understanding blue—we go round
in circles. Hugon (2011) gives Dharmakīrti's response to that
charge, which consists essentially of a tu quoque
argument—one needs to understand what a term excludes as much as
what it applies to. Hale (2011) reformulates the difficulty as being
that the Buddhist seems to run counter to the compositionality of
language; he argues that the non-Buddhist criticism will thus remain.
The problem is discussed intensely by Indo-Tibetan thinkers, like
Śāntarakṣita (for further discussion, see the
entry on him)
and Sa skya Paṇḍita (see Hugon 2008, 479–485,
205–210). What is striking is that while it can certainly be
argued—as these thinkers do—that a meaningful term
presents both a class of things to which it applies and another to
which it does not apply, it is difficult to see how the latter would
or should occupy a privileged place. Why would we understand words
first and foremost by the via negativa?

On a bottom-up approach, on the other hand, the double exclusion plays
a comparatively minor role, and thus some of the
Kumārila-Uddyotakara criticisms may be less telling. Causal
chains and error are what serve to bridge the scheme-content gap,
rather than the descriptive content of the apoha. It is
notable that such reliance on causality seems to be entirely absent in
Dignāga: it is Dharmakīrti's major contribution to the
theory. The way words link to things is thus primarily explained
through the existence of a causal chain from particular things to
perceptions to thoughts and to the utterances of words—in short
we have a type of causal theory of
reference.[40]
While modern day causal theories of reference—such as that of
Saul Kripke—are typically used to explain how proper names can
refer without descriptive content, the theory can be extended in
various ways to kind terms. Such is the move of Hilary Putnam who
emphasized that descriptive content, or at its simplest just
“what is in one's head”, is not enough to distinguish
between seemingly similar kinds. Dharmakīrti's causal theory too
is not restricted to the reference of proper names, but also seeks to
explain causally reference to kinds of things. The causal connection
is needed to guarantee “contact” with the world, i.e.,
that language ultimately must rest upon perception, which is
non-abitrary in that it is “fixed” by things.
Dharmakīrti thus explains how an individual (to be called
“Jones”) can think about and refer to such and such an
object in the world through a complex and long causal chain from the
particular objects to the mental invention of a quasi-universal and
the use of a word on a specific occasion. Thoughts and talk of blue
are thus about blue things because only blue things play the
appropriate causal role in leading to the thought and finally the
word.[41]

Here are the bare bones of the causal account as we find it in the
Pramāṇavārttika: Jones sees particular blue
things and they cause perceptual images (ākāra) in
his mind; these images (and often other factors, like longstanding
habits) cause him to make the “same judgment”
(ekapratyavamarśa), “This is blue,” a
judgment to which appears an apoha, i.e., a generic
representation of non-non-blue. Because the particular perceptual
images all have the same effect in leading to the same judgment
“This is blue”, they all therefore share a key causal
power and are grouped together. The judgments and resulting use of
words are about blue things, and not red things, precisely because
there is a causal chain from blue particulars and there isn't one from
red
particulars.[42]

So much for causal connections replacing real universals to group
entities. How then do words refer to grouped entities via a causal
chain? And how does the causal chain get passed on over time in a
community of speakers? It looks like we have something much like the
two-fold process of reference-fixing and reference-borrowing that
figure in causal theories of
reference.[43]

The initial reference-fixing is done “at the time of
[establishing] the linguistic convention”
(saṃketakāle)[44]
by dubbing a sample case with the words, “This is blue”.
This dubbing is a purely causal event not dependent on any descriptive
content. It is an arbitrary choice, or speech-intention
(vivakṣā), of the dubber to designate a blue
sample with the term “blue” rather than
another.[45]
Other things will then also be grouped together under
“blue” by the combination of perception and judgment
described above. This initial reference-fixing is then preserved in a
commonly respected convention that transmits the original intention
and dubbing from speaker to
speaker.[46]
Subsequently “at the time of using [language]
conventions” (vyavahārakāle) other speakers
will rely on their previous habits, or “imprints”
(vāsanā), and the earlier reference-fixing that is
now a well-established convention in the community. Although speakers
could in principle use the word “blue” to refer to, say,
the colour of chocolate, practical considerations generally mean that
they won't: if someone wishes to tap into the causal chain transmitted
from the initial dubbing, she will use “blue” for blue
things exclusively.

Dharmakīrti's version of the apoha theory is developed
in long sections in several chapters of
Pramāṇavārttika. No doubt, many questions
need a fuller treatment. Here are two of the main ones. (1) Given that
this is a causal rather than descriptive account of aboutness, what
role remains for the apoha, i.e., the double negations upon
which Dignāga had placed so much emphasis? (2) Wouldn't having
the same powers to produce such and such a judgment depend on having
some common universals, or even itself be a common universal, and thus
force us to reinstate realism?

(1)

Dharmakīrti and his commentators constantly account for the
mental content of thought in terms of generic representations that are
“exclusions of what is other” (anyāpoha),
this from the “time of [establishing] the linguistic
convention” (saṃketakāla) to the “time
when one uses the convention”
(vyavahārakāla). But if aboutness is indeed assured
causally, what is the theoretical interest of anyāpoha?
Either Dharmakīrti's theory of reference is not purely causal,
but is a hybrid theory involving both causal and descriptive
elements,[47]
or anyāpoha is not there in Dharmakīrti's theory
to assure aboutness/reference but is his response to another type of
concern. Although there certainly are modern hybrid theories of
reference combining the causal and the descriptive, it is not clear
how (or if) Dharmakīrti proposes to do that. What seems more
likely following
Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti ad 68–75
and ad 128 (see Dunne 2004, 134–136 and 339–352) is that
anyāpoha is there in the theory essentially to answer
metaphysical worries. Granted that we think that the mental content,
i.e., the generic representation, has a distribution (anvaya)
over several instances, is it genuinely distinct from or the same as
the instances? In the former case, it would not apply to them; in the
latter case it would itself be a particular and unable to apply to
other particulars. The postulate of anyāpoha is designed
to avoid that dilemma of a quasi-universal being the same or
different—it is neither as it unreal. As Dunne (2004, 136) puts
it: “…by relegating distribution to a negation,
Dharmakīrti blocks any attempt at raising distribution (or a
distributed entity) to the level of ultimate reality.”

(2)

That multiple particulars all have the same power to produce the
same judgment is not, for Dharmakīrti, itself based on any
underlying same intrinsic features that would explain why this is so.
In Pramāṇavārttika III.73–74 he cites a
famous example of different plants that all have the capacity to
alleviate fever, but where one cannot point out any features in common
that would account for the fact that all the various plants work as
febrifuges. Similarly for particulars all causing the same judgment:
there is no common property that would explain why this
happens.[48]
But can't one say that all of them having that capacity just
is possession of a common universal, i.e. having the power to
produce the same judgment? Lacking that common universal-feature, how
could we judge that the particulars have the same power? This argument
should seem déjà vu for the nominalist. We've
come full circle back to realist's basic worry: how could we group
things without there being some real universal in common?
Dharmakīrti's response is to say that in fact particulars don't
really possess a common power, if one means by that a power that would
itself be a universal. The powers themselves are all particulars and
differ from each other—the way one plant works is not the way
the other works to cure fever and the way one blue particular causes
the judgment “This is blue” differs from the way another
does. These multiple ways exhibit no intrinsic properties in common
that would explain why they all work to produce a desired common
effect. At most there is just the negative grouping of being distinct
from everything which lacks the power, and that, as we know by now, is
an apoha and not a real property.

The way the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti school represent the mental
process of reasoning is that one thinks: “A is
B because of being C, like D.” More
specifically, one invokes a logical reason C to prove the
truth of the conclusion A is B; the example
D, which is actually sometimes omitted, is a commonly
acknowledged case of B-ness and C-ness that permits
an individual to understand that all Cs are indeed
Bs. The latter generalization is known as
“pervasion” (vyāpti; Tibetan khyab
pa) of C by B—a universally generalized
material implication, for all x: if x is C then x is B, with
the interesting feature that the quantification ranges over both
actual and non-actual items. (The indispensability or dispensability
of the example for one to ascertain/establish the pervasion becomes a
hotly debated topic amongst later
theoreticians.[49])

There is also an important variant where the truth of
“A is B” is not being established, but
only the fact that it would follow from an acceptance
(abhyupagama) of A being C. Thus a debater
can present an opponent with a prasaṅga (consequence)
of the sort: “It would follow absurdly that A would be
B, because of being C.” Such a consequence
will constitute the key step in a proof by reductio ad absurdum, a
proof that will culminate in a type of contraposition, turning on
modus tollens. When the pervasion in the consequence holds
and the opponent understands that A is not in fact
B, the opponent will then be led by a “contraposition
of the consequence” (prasaṅgaviparyaya, literally
“reversing the consequence”) to understand that A
is not in fact C because of not being B. Both these
structures, i.e., proofs by logical reasons and consequences, are to
be found in Indian and Tibetan writing on a variety of subjects.

Since T. Stcherbatsky's two volume study and translation of
Dharmakīrti's Nyāyabindu, entitled Buddhist
Logic (i.e., Stcherbatsky 1930/32), one often sees the Buddhist
theory of reasons/indices designated as “logic,” a term
that sometimes has the unwanted effect of leading readers to think
that good reasons for Buddhists are simply those that are formally
valid. In fact, the notion of formal validity (i.e., the conclusion's
being guaranteed true, provided the premises are true) is not
itself explicitlydiscussed by Buddhist
theoreticians; it is in any case not distinguished from other, more
informal, considerations. Instead of formally valid reasons, Buddhist
theoreticians developed the notion of a good reason
(saddhetu, Tibetan rtags yang dag), i.e., one which
satisfies a triple criterion (trairūpya). These three
criteria for “goodness” are given in the following fashion
from Dharmakīrti on:

pakṣadharmatva (the logical reason's being a
property of the subject): the subject A is ascertained
(niścita) as having the property C;

anvayavyāpti (pervasion [that is formulated] as
co-presence ): C is ascertained as present in only instances
similar (sapakṣa) to A insofar as they possess
B;

vyatirekavyāpti (pervasion [formulated] as
co-absence): C is ascertained as wholly absent from instances
dissimilar (vipakṣa) to A insofar as they do
not possess
B.[50]

True, in texts like the Hetucakra of Dignāga (which was
taken up in detail by Dharmakīrti in
Pramāṇavārttika IV and
Pramāṇaviniścaya III), a version of the
triple criterion (trairūpya) for good reasons and the
operators “partial presence,” “complete
presence,” and “complete absence” were correlated to
yield a series of nine types of reasons, types that are
abstracted from content and subject matter. Not inappropriately, the
great historian of logic, Innocentius Bocheński, in the chapter
on Indian Logic in his History of Formal Logic, stated that
the Hetucakra thus suggested an awareness of formal
considerations. R.S.Y. Chi, in his Buddhist Formal Logic (Chi
1984), went several steps further and attempted to show that the
Hetucakra, taken in its formal aspects, might present a
number of interesting features to a modern logician. That being said,
there is certainly much more to “good reasons” satisfying
Dharmakīrti's triple criterion than simple formal validity. The
term “ascertained” (niścita), when unpacked
by Dharmakīrti and his commentators, demands that good reasons
must be sound (i.e., the premises must in fact be true and the
conclusion must follow from them), that their three characteristics
must be ascertained, and that the opponent have the appropriate
“desire to know” (jijñāsā)
something new that he does not already know. This latter demand leads
to a host of other requirements: in order to be convinced of something
new the opponent must have the requisite doubt, understand the terms
and accept the subject of debate. In short, good reasons involve
formal considerations (what follows from what?); factual
considerations (what is so? what is true?); epistemic considerations
(what needs to be known in order for people to genuinely know
something else? when is doubt possible?); and what can be termed
“rhetorical considerations” (what is newly convincing to
whom? when does the debate have a point and when does it fall flat?).
The weighting of these aspects in the theory of the “triple
criterion” changes over history in complex fashions. At certain
points what were factual matters become epistemic matters, and this
even leads to interesting reorientations of the triple
criterion.[51]

Later theoretical elaborations by Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, et
al. about how to present publicly (i.e., verbally) a good
reason (saddhetu) to an adversary in a debate prescribe the
use of complex verbal forms known as prayoga (formal
reasonings). Thus, for example, the standard formal reasoning that
Dharmakīrti and his Indo-Tibetan successors prescribed
was a two-membered form, known as an
“inference-for-others”
(parārthānumāna):

All Cs are Bs, like D.

A is C.

Commentators make an explicit correlation with the triple criterion
(trairūpya). Thus the first statement perspicuously
expresses the pervasion (i.e., the anvayavyāpti and
vyatirekavyāpti) and the second expresses the fact of
the reason being a property of the subject
(pakṣadharmatva). The statement of the conclusion,
A is B, is omitted. Indeed it is explicitly ruled
out in later prescriptive accounts of how Buddhists should argue.
Dharmakīrti's own position on this hardens over time to arrive,
in the Vādanyāya, at the view that stating the
conclusion is actually a “point of defeat”
(nigrahasthāna). The irrelevance of the conclusion is
supposedly because the only function of an inference-for-others is to
show “provers” (sādhana), and a conclusion
cannot prove itself. Although A is B, i.e.,
“what is to be proved” (sādhya), can be
understood indirectly, it should not be stated. While the
inference-for-others has often been thought to somehow formally
resemble a syllogism in Aristotelian logic, it is apparent that the
presence and absence of conclusions in syllogisms and
inferences-for-others respectively as well as the idea of what
constitutes a “prover” for Buddhists, means that
parārthānumāna and Aristotelian syllogisms are
accounted for in terms of considerably different philosophies of logic
(see Tillemans 1999, 69–87).

While provers (sādhana), i.e., logical reasons and
examples, can of course be expressed in words, as in a
“public” inference-for-others, they are not themselves
words. Although Dharmakīrti, et al. speak in terms of one state
of affairs, or one entity (artha), proving another, in fact
the picture has all the complex features of the scheme-content gap and
its bridges: logical reasoning is a mental process that directly
treats of fictional proxies, i.e., concepts, which are in turn
connected in apoha-fashion to real particular entities. Not
surprisingly, the idea that provers are apoha-properties
rather than words has its philosophical complexities. When do we have
the same property and when do they differ? When a pervasion is
bidirectional (Tibetan: yin khyab mnyam), as in the case of
being impermanent (anityatva) and being produced
(kṛtakatva), it's quite easy to see that the
impermanent particulars will be identical with the produced
particulars. Given that the bidirectional pervasion analyzes as
“for all x, x is produced if and only if
x is impermanent”, the extension of the two concepts
(i.e., the set of impermanent particulars and the set of produced
particulars) is the same for Buddhists. Nonetheless, substitutivity of
one term for the other would seem to lead to an invalid inference
where the premises are true but the conclusion is not. To bring out
the problem, take the following tempting, but invalid, inference:

Being a product is a good reason for proving that sound is
impermanent.

Being a
product is coextensive with being impermanent (i.e., for all
x: x is a product if and only if x is
impermanent).

Therefore, being impermanent is a good reason for proving that
sound is impermanent.

We go from two true premises to a false conclusion, for it is clear
that for a Buddhist (as for most people) arguing that something is so
simply because it is so is not giving a good reason. And yet
it might also be thought that the move from premises to conclusion is
an acceptable application of the principle of substitutivity of
identicals for identicals salva veritate. What went
wrong?

Dharmakīrti, in Pramāṇavārttika I verse
40 et sq. and Svavṛtti, diagnosed the problem as one of
bidirectional pervasions (i.e., coextensive concepts) seeming to force
us to accept pratijñārthaikadeśahetu
“reasons that are one part of the thesis” (e.g., when one
says “sound is impermanent because it is impermanent,”
then the reason “being impermanent” is also a part of the
thesis that is being proved). He saw this undesirable consequence as
one of the main challenges to logical thought, i.e.,
“inference,” being a source of knowledge
(pramāṇa), for unless one can somehow rule out the
problematic substitutions in what I have called the “tempting
inference,” we would be saddled with having to accept as good a
huge number of singularly uninformative reasons.

The problem is recognizably the familiar one of substitutivity in
referentially opaque contexts, such as propositional attitudes and
modal
contexts.[52]
Talk of good reasons being ones where the debater has a desire to
know P but not an equivalent Q is indeed an opaque
context. To analyse what goes wrong in the tempting inference,
Dharmakīrti, in effect, made a recognizable move by
distinguishing between types of identities: “being
impermanent” and “being produced” are extensionally
identical, but somehow not intensionally so—what he terms being
the same concept, i.e., exclusion (apoha;
vyāvṛtti). And in the opaque context substitution
should only be made between conceptually identical terms.

In fact, though, it could be said that the usual idea of an
intensional identity (one that is understood to hold between
properties F and G when the biconditional for
all x: x is F if and only if x is G is true in all possible
worlds) will not get us very far out of the woods, as being
impermanent and being produced are arguably identical in that
way, and it would thus seem that if that is what conceptual
identity is about for a Buddhist Epistemologist it should be
possible to make the substitution in the opaque contexts under
discussion. Dharmakīrti's idea of concepts F and
G being identical thus demands a much stronger criterion than
the necessary truth of the biconditional for all x: x is F iff x
is G. In his Svavṛtti ad verse 40 and in
considerable detail in the Tibetan Geluk (dge lugs)
“Collected Topics” (bsdus grwa) literature and
commentaries on Pramāṇavārttika, we find the
makings of an idea of “conceptual identity/difference”
(Tibetan ldog pa gcig/tha dad) such that to each meaningful
subject or predicate term in a language there is a different
concept—synonyms, for example, will express different concepts.
Interestingly enough, although this individuation of
exclusions/concepts might seem to lead to an undesirable proliferation
of strange ultra-intensional entities, at least certain
Epistemologists—e.g., Śāntarakṣita,
Kamalaśīla and very clearly the twelfth-thirteenth century
Tibetan Sa skya Paṇḍita (in the first chapter of his
Tshad ma rigs gter)—emphasized that concepts were just
fictions, façons de parler for different states of
mind, and even that concepts were not to be reified as any
kind of object (viṣaya; Tibetan yul) at all.
The states of mind could be individuated unproblematically, and so
derivatively we could somehow perhaps individuate the concepts too
without committing ourselves to a plethora of occult objects, one for
each word. It remains to be seen, however, whether shifting the burden
to states of mind gets us out of the woods or still leaves us with
“subsistent” entities that should make ontologically
scrupulous nominalists cringe in horror.

Finally, what of the Buddhist religion? While Dharmakīrti has
sometimes been depicted as a dry practitioner of an essentially
secular philosophy, this seems hardly defensible. Technical logical
and epistemological discussions on sources of knowledge were not just
pursued for their own sake. They were also used to establish Buddhist
religious doctrines, like the Four Noble Truths, the proofs of the
Buddha being an authoritative/reliable person
(pramāṇapuruṣa, Tibetan tshad ma'i skyes
bu), the law of retribution of acts (karman),
reincarnation, compassion, omniscience, the innate Buddha-nature,
absence of real personal identity,
etc.[53]
All these topics are treated in extenso in the second
chapter of Pramāṇavārttika, and some form the
subject of independent treatises by later Epistemologists. There is
also a concern with direct perception of religious truths and the
methods leading to that extraordinary type of knowledge. In the third
chapter of Pramāṇavārttika and in the
perception chapters of the Nyāyabindu and
Pramāṇaviniścaya, for example,
Dharmakīrti seeks to explain and rationalize the perception of a
yogin (yogipratyakṣa). He advocates a quite remarkable
method of meditation—more literally “cultivation”
(bhāvanā; abhyāsa)—in which
philosophical analysis plays an indispensable role (see e.g., Taber
2009; see Tillemans 2016, chapter 10, on Dharmakīrti-style
meditation, its epistemological challenges and the contrast with Chan
Buddhist approaches).

The whys and wherefores of Dharmakīrti's philosophy of religion
are no doubt partly explained by the historical context in which he
lived, one in which Buddhist institutions and power were confronted
with forceful challenges of a reinvigorated
Brahmanism.[54]
Indeed, not just on matters of Buddhist doctrine but also on many
metaphysical issues was there a religious dimension to his arguments.
In the latter half of the first chapter of
Pramāṇavārttika, Dharmakīrti proceeds to
a detailed attack on the authority of the Vedas, the Brahmins that
expound them, the Brahmanical ideas about the efficacy of mantras, and
the system of caste (see Eltschinger 2000). It is noteworthy that a
frequent Sanskrit term for “universal”,
“kind”, i.e., jāti, is also the term for
“caste.” As Eltschinger (2000) shows, the discussions on
the unreality of universals and the unreality of caste were related
for Dharmakīrti, and were explicitly taken to be related by
commentators like Śākyabuddhi and Karṇakagomin. Castes
were natural kinds explainable through universals for non-Buddhists,
and were not arbitrary or man-made customary distinctions. An obvious
pay-off of Dharmakīrti's nominalism, then, was that Buddhists
could further distance themselves from Brahmanical principles of
social organization and ethics by attacking the metaphysical
foundations of caste.

The debate with Brahmanical schools on specific doctrinal questions
naturally moved to long and involved discussions on issues of
scriptural authority, such as the Mīmāṃsaka school's
justification of the Vedas as being eternal, uncreated by
humans (apauruṣeya) and hence authoritative because
free from any human influence. (The Buddhist retort is essentially
that if per impossibile scriptures were uncreated, they would
be incomprehensible, for there would be no speakers' intentions.) On
the role of scripture Dharmakīrti actually had a nuanced
position. In Pramāṇavārttika I.213–217
et sq. and in IV.48–108 he maintains that scripture shouldn't be
used on factual or rationally decidable matters; perception and
logical reasoning trump the scriptures of one's own school; one is not
to be faulted for rejecting one's school's scriptures when reason
dictates it; on rationally undecidable matters, however, that is on
so-called “radically inaccessible things”
(atyantaparokṣa), like the specific details of the law
of karman (exactly what actions in past lives lead to what
results in the future?), scriptural accounts need to be relied upon
because of the absence of any other means (agatyā)
(I.216). Scripture, if it passes certain conditions, can be designated
as being an inferential source of knowledge, but is always fallible
and not to be considered a full-fledged source of knowledge,
as “it has no claim to certainty” (nāto
niścayaḥ), unlike bona fide inferences
(Svavṛtti ad I.318). The eighth century commentator
Śākyabuddhi summarizes things interestingly in his
commentary to I.216: scripture is simply needed by (indeed,
indispensable to) those who wish to set out upon the spiritual path
(pravṛttikāma), but it is not grounded in any
objective facts (vastutas) (Tillemans 1999, ch. 2).

This is a surprisingly fallibilist and pragmatic position for a deeply
religious thinker. Taken further, it would have major consequences for
Buddhist ethics. The use of appeals to “radically
inaccessible” facts to justify ethical positions was recognized
by Dharmakīrti to be flawed in public debate. Indeed he seems to
have been quite aware that invoking such purely scriptural positions
would fall flat outside the context of convinced
Buddhists.[55]
The lesson could have been that Buddhists should genuinely privilege
rational considerations debatable by all, rather than heavily
weighting “proofs” that were for the faithful.
Unfortunately, however, over history the later Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
scholastic apologists transformed the Dharmakīrtian view on
scripture, indeed all of his religious philosophy, into an
increasingly rigid
edifice.[56]
Dharmakīrti became the defender of the Buddhist
faith—the “lord of reasoning” (Tib. rigs pa'i
dbang phyug). It is regrettable that much of the thought of this
highly inquisitive and subtle philosopher often became, in later
Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, a series of unquestioned formulae to
secure Buddhist fundamentalism.

An ongoing bibliography of editions and translations of
Dharmakīrti's seven works and those of other major Buddhist
authors on epistemology and logic is presented on the site
Epistemology and Argumentation in South Asia and Tibet
(www.east.uni-hd.de). Here are what we consider to be principal
editions and translations of Dharmakīrti's main work, the
Pramāṇavārttika.

The Sanskrit and Tibetan texts of the verses of
Pramāṇavārttika are edited in Miyasaka
(1971/72). The Sanskrit of the autocommentary
(Svavṛtti) is edited in Gnoli (1960). Chapter I and
autocommentary are partially translated in several publications:
I.1–10 plus autocommentary is translated into English in Gillon
and Hayes (1991); I.1–51 plus autocommentary are translated into
English in Mookerjee and Nagasaki (1964). For a German translation of
Chapter I.40–185 plus autocommentary, see Frauwallner (1932;
1933). Eltschinger (2007) gives a French translation of
I.213–268. Eltschinger, Krasser, and Taber (2012) contains an
English translation of I.312-340 and of the Autocommentary by
Dharmakīrti. Dunne (2004) gives English translations of
I.34–37, 68–75, 137–142, 214–223. Parts of
Chapter II are translated into English in Franco (1997), Dunne (2004),
van Bijlert (1989), and into German in Vetter (1990). Chapter III is
translated into Japanese in Tosaki (1979; 1985); Dunne (2004)
translated III.1–10, 194–224. Chapter IV.1–148 is
translated into English in Tillemans (2000). For other partial
translations of Pramāṇavārttika and passages
from its Indian commentaries, see also the table in Dunne (2004), p.
333–334. For an earlier, but still important, bibliography on
the research on Buddhist epistemology and logic, see Steinkellner and
Much (1995).

–––, 1966, An Introduction to Buddhist
Philosophy. An Annotated Translation of the Tarkabhāṣā
of Mokṣākaragupta, Kyoto: Memoirs of the Faculty of
Letters, Kyoto University. Reprinted in Mimaki et al. (eds.),
1989.

Kataoka, Kei, 2003, “The Mīmāṃsā
Definition of Pramāṇa as a Source of New
Information,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 31:
89–103.